Well, it’s been a bit over a year since I “retired” and the big news is that I have been lured out of total retirement and am now ‘kinda sorta” retired. This past spring a woman who I had worked with way back in 1998 called and wanted me to work for her. I told […]
Wailee (my wife) an I were driving home form her brother-in-law’s funeral back on June 1st and had stopped in the Cadence, Inc. plant in Staunton, VA (her nephew is the CEO) and mid-tour I got the dreaded phone call and when my boss started with “Hey John, this is not a good call…” I […]
I sit here in front of my computer this evening after a long, difficult, and somewhat painful day. It was actually a very mixed day. What a day Christ must have had that Thursday. I am sitting here, night has just fallen and Christ is headed out to the Garden at Gethsemane with a few […]
The crucifixion was the most gruesome death that Rome had in its arsenal. Second to that was whipping or flogging. The Imperial Roman Army used these two tools to strike fear into those that opposed it in the lands they conquered. Let’s look at flogging for a minute. When most of us think of whipping […]
I recently inserted myself into a disagreement between a friend and our congregation. Seeing as the congregation is composed of imperfect humans, disagreements are going to happen. It is how we handle those disagreements that counts. But, being a man, I immediately went into solution mode, whereas my wife, being a woman, went into “emotion” […]
Yesterday, I blogged for the first time in a while. My pretense was to place forth my thoughts on why people leave the church as a whole because of the actions of a few. What I ended up doing, though, was writing about our latest episode of congregational wounding. What I want to address now […]
This morning I read a blog entry titled “Church Hurt” that Leah Ness posted a bit over a month ago and it got me to thinking about the church hurt in our lives. My wife, Wailee, and I have been hurt several times by different congregations – the most recent was last November. The good […]
Last Sunday at church during prayer requests, my dear wife Wailee got up and gave a mini-testimony. She didn’t want to do it, but the Holy Spirit convinced her to do it. She talked about how we’ve been assailed on all fronts since last September. First her niece died, then a very close friend of […]
I built a fire out in the back yard yesterday afternoon (last Sunday evening). For the past couple of months, Wailee has been assailed on all fronts and it has brought up buckets of grief and hurt from her past. We pulled up the sling lawn chairs, sat for a spell and talked about life, […]
I’ll be the first to admit it, I am a wood butcher! Hi, my name is John and I am a wood-a-holic. My wife asked me to build her some shelves for the storage closet in the family room. “Easy enough,” I thought. “I’ve got that pile of Poplar from the tree I cut down […]
The Watson's Virginia Oddysey 